The Billionaire Test

By the way, I think I forgot to link to my last Slate piece, which was about transfer gossip. I encourage you to read it if you’re gazing out at what is suddenly an autumn day and longing for the swelter of August and the scent of sunscreen and the certainty that Fernando Torres is on his way to Chelsea.

I have a new piece in Slate about the Hicks-Gillett-Glazers tycoon implosion and the fan protests at Liverpool and Manchester United. While I was working on the piece, it occurred to me that in this age of billionaire owners, in which every club, no matter how Portsmouth-y, can be plausibly linked to a gasp-wrenching imaginary stock portfolio, there are really two kinds of billionaires: billionaires and fake billionaires. Billionaires live in space, sleep in chocolate and eat a helicopter as a snack. Fake billionaires drive around looking important on the way to being yelled at by suburban bank managers. Somehow we’ve evolved a culture in which it’s possible to have some contacts, borrow a fortune, and get a profile in the US Airways in-flight magazine, even though at the same moment real billionaires are playing badminton on the moon with movie stars only millionaires have even heard of. It’s a confusing time to be a soccer fan.

The problem, of course, is that, while we’re all getting savvier by the second, the deals are often still so secretive and the facial expressions all so billionaireish that it can be hard to tell a fake billionaire from a real one. When the ousted crown prince of G______ comes sniffing around your club, should you start worrying about Wachovia or let yourself dream of a future of massively overpaying for Craig Bellamy? After some serious thought, and a sandwich, I’ve put together a simple two-minute test that will help you determine whether your club’s new billionaire is pregnant, or still praying every night and crying a little, secretly, in the kitchen, at his best friend’s baby shower.

Question #1: Can you envision your billionaire belonging to a country club? From the moment Tom Hicks and George Gillett first showed themselves in the stands at Anfield, with their weird, googly-craggly, “I’m trying so hard to look like a billionaire that my eyeballs are popping out of my head at different speeds” faces, it was clear that the only place on earth they could truly be comfortable was in the yacht room at the Sandy Pines Country Club, where they could go around shaking hands and loudly saying other men’s first names. No billionaire should ever belong to a country club, for the same reason that Oprah should never go on The View. Rich people clump together in country clubs for mutual protection and assurance. A real billionaire doesn’t need protection, because he can afford a private security force, and he doesn’t need assurance, because he is a billionaire.

Question #2: Does your billionaire sort of come off as a soap opera character? Having unlimited wealth allows one’s ego to expand without restraint, like gas in a hot air balloon the size of infinity. Conversely, soap operas foster the pinched intensification of conventional fantasies enforced by profound limitations on one’s ego. The lifestyle of a soap-opera billionaire will revolve around widely accepted status symbols, with minor eccentricites (an eyepatch! weird facial hair!) at the fringes. The eccentricities of the true billionaire are his status symbols. Tom Hicks has a yacht. Roman Abramovich has a yacht with its own submarine. Malcom Glazer used to have a $27-million mansion in Palm Beach. Lakshmi Mittal has a house decorated with marble from the same quarry as the Taj Mahal. You couldn’t set As the World Turns there, because the world only turns if he says it does. It’s not even his only house in London.

Question #3: If your billionaire broke the law, would there be repercussions? A true billionaire is essentially his own country. He transcends the apparatus of any single state and acts as an independent principle of order, like gravity or a weird idea on Lost. Wherever he goes, he’s three mean Beatles and the world around him is Ringo. If George Gillett woke up with a headache, a slippery flashlight, and a bloody corpse in a Donald Duck costume, he would feel the chill of a man who dreads the movements of justice. With pristine clarity, he would realize that somewhere in the world was a DA who yearned to take him down. If Alisher Usmanov woke up in similar circumstances, he would yawn, yell for his slippers, and note that the day was Tuesday. Why do you think Putin is always expressing fatherly disapproval of Abramovich and inviting him on orca-wrestling expeditions? Because even for Putin—especially for Putin—it’s easier to wrestle an orca than to go against a billionaire.

Question #4: Is your billionaire kind of a prissy killjoy who throws his weight around? Usmanov may live without fear of legal consequences, but he’s still not a real billionaire, because he’s constantly hopping up and down and pointing one finger and sending his lawyers after bloggers who dare to repeat that he was once imprisoned in Uzbekistan for cooking and eating every chicken in the country. Pale, impoverished bloggers with many children to feed are rhythmically dotting a conveyor belt aimed at prison because Usmanov does not want you to know that he once ate an entire nation’s chicken supply in one sitting. He may not be afraid of the police any more, but he’s afraid of something, even if it’s just public disapproval. The real billionaire isn’t thin-skinned. The real billionaire doesn’t have skin at all, having long since replaced it with a bulletproof carapace that’s indistinguishable from the real thing except in extremely bright sunlight.

Question #5: Is your billionaire worth more than $10 billion? I’m sorry, but billionaires who are only worth between one and nine billion dollars are pathetic. It’s odd. When a guy is worth $990 million, he’s unimaginably rich, but when he crosses over to $1.1 billion, you can bet that it’s all unpaid taxes and outstanding furniture debts. Somehow or other, it’s just impossible to sustain real billionairehood on less than ten stacks, meaning that the Glazers of this world are always taking out little piggish loans from Manchester United, while Paul Allen literally doesn’t know that the city of Seattle exists. Go by Forbes, go by Wikipedia, whatever, but check out your man’s bottom line. If it’s lodged in the mere ten figures, he is a man without dignity who can’t really afford your club. Condolences.

—

There. Now you can look at your own club’s billionaire and make an informed decision about your populist reign of terror. Please enjoy reading the conclusion of this “blog post.”

On No. 3, I thought you were going to mention Mikhail Prokhorov. If I’m remembering correctly, he flew high-end hookers into France for lord knows what at a resort in the Alps, which, surprisingly, is a shocking act that the French have outlawed. Transporting hookers into France, that is. I believe his excuse was, “I’m attracted to beautiful women. How is that illegal?” And French authorities just let it go.

Conversely, suggesting that Tom Hicks has ever entertained a sexual thought graces him with human qualities he clearly does not possess.

@ESPNCommentary Yeah, I think there has to be an exception for Augusta. Actually, it’s possible that any country club with a recent history of controversial racial and/or gender discrimination could be a good fit for a billionaire.

I don’t know if this holds up, but I think that if you read in the British sporting press that a billionaire is trying to buy your club BEFORE he buys it, then he isn’t really a billionaire. Real billionaires have no need to leak stories to the Sun, or have drawn out ownership sagas. They just send a flunky into the boardroom with a wheelbarrow full of cash. Job done.

@withaplum Real billionaires never reveal their presences unless it suits them. A real billionaire could own your club right now and you’d never know. Why, I bet Sheikh Mansour & co. don’t even own Man City—they’re just helping out some secret billionaire friend and playing the rest of us in a joke we’ll never understand.

Another amazing post by you, Brian. Inspiring me to continue my blog while tempting me to shut it down completely

I am wondering what your point is with this article. Are you protesting the Gillettes, Hicks, and Glazers or are you merely putting it on the table.

Not being a fan of United or Liverpool myself it’s easy for me to look this objectively, I’ll give my two cents regardless. Billionaire or not I do not see how it is relevant, in order for Gillette and co. to get the debt financing from the banks for their deals they need to have a pretty damn good track record and if you look and their financial histories they do. To me the only way there can be any reasonable complaints about your ownership is if its cutting into your teams’ transfer kitty. Liverpool signed Meireles, Cole, Jovanovic, Poulsen, and Konchesky and apparently their ownership are what’s killing the team, similar story for Manchester United.

I’m going to read your new article in Slate now and may comment further later. Basically I feel that, Billionaire or not, if you can buy a team there is a good reason for that and you are a smart cookie and unless it is effecting the day to day operations of your club there is no reason to complain.

Spurs have a fake Billionaire in Joe Lewis owning the club. However, while his wealth took a big hit with Bear Stearns (down to $3.3Bil) he is effectively invisible and allows the club to be run in such a way as to limit any and all self-aggrandizement.

Tottenham Hotspur does not however, provide a case study to refute Brian Phillip’s argument because it is not a Billionaire’s ego-puff purchase.

Tottenham Hotspur FC is a vehicle through which Joe Lewis’ good pal Daniel Levy can play Real Life Football Manager.

It is therefore submitted that Mr Phillip’s general theory is upstanding.

@Caleb Ticket prices at Man Utd have almost doubled since the Glazers came along. Liverpool is currently being run by the banks because the owners piled an unmanageable debt load onto the club; their promised stadium project has gone nowhere; their best players stuck around this season only because the board assured them there would be new owners soon. I think the ownership situation is affecting the day-to-day operations of the clubs.

@John Louis Swaine Joe Lewis has two billionaire-worthy things going for him: the fact that he lives in the Bahamas and the fact that he’s a mystery cypher whom no one has ever seen. But he fails every billionaire test except #4, as well as my unofficial test #6, “Is your billionaire known for buying a $700 million share in a collapsing financial institution and killing 25% of his fortune in three minutes?” That’s a dramatic, billionaire-like gesture, but real billionaires aren’t stupid.

I like to pretend Abramovich named his yacht-sub “The S.S. Didier,”, and every time Drogba scores he gives a little subtle fist pump and pretends that he is looking through a periscope while yelling something about firing up the bilge pumps.

Then again, that may be what Drogba does in his own mind as well…this is a tricky business, getting into the heads of millionaires and billionaires.

Even more impressive than Mikhail Prokhorov flying hookers to an Alpine resort was his admitting during a 60 Minutes interview earlier this year that he was clueless as to the whereabouts of his personal yacht. How do you lose a yacht? It’s a yacht!

And, if my memory serves me well, during the interview introducing himself to America, Prokhorov also showed off a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

Brilliant! The Portsmouth billionaires are scarecrows – they mark an illusion of wealth via unpaid taxes on shady subsidiary corporations in the Cayman that peddle estate planning advice to American retirees. The REAL billionaries, ala City, have notoriously shady businesses with blanket immunity for life (ala oil or gazprom)